Wayne Bledsoe: Cell phone radiation panic!

With every wonderful technological advance comes new fears and dangers. I'm sure days after the wheel was invented some hapless creature ran underneath it (probably an ancestor of the possum) and was turned into pre-historical modern art. The creature's family mourned. Crows suddenly appreciated art for its edibility and have celebrated ever since. And, the guy with the wheel said, "That's the price of progress, little creature" (or the grunt equivalent), and rolled on to suck fermented fruit with his buddies.

One of the greatest inventions of the past 30 years is the cell phone. Now my kids can call and tell me they're where I told them to be from wherever they really are. And if a car breaks down in the middle of the night, there's no need to walk five miles to the nearest pay phone as my friend Darryl and I had to do at 3 a.m. one day in the 1970s.

However, now some people (mostly people wanting to sell us something) are insisting that radiation from our cell phones is giving us cancer.

Radiation, of course, doesn't do any of the cool things it was supposed to like make giant vegetables (like on "Gilligan's Island") or giant ants ("Them!") or shrink a guy so he has to fight a spider to get some cake crumbs ("The Incredible Shrinking Man"). No, seems that it either gives you cancer or helps fight it. And sometimes while it's helping you fight one kind, it's giving you another kind.

What we're talking about with cell phones is radio frequency (RF), which is a type of electromagnetic radiation that falls into the nonionizing category. The ionizing sorts include gamma rays and X-rays, which can definitely cause your body some damage. Nonionizing radiation can cause tissues to heat up. Does that little bit of heating up of body tissues when you have your cell phone up against your body cause any damage? Most experts say probably not, but studies have been inconclusive.

The Federal Communications Commission does put certain limits on the specific absorption rate (SAR) of cell phones - meaning the level of radiation that a phone is prone to let absorb into your body. It is somewhat troubling that your cell phone owner's manual indicates that your phone is supposed to be kept in a harness on your belt or at a certain distance from your body. This is actually where the FCC's SAR ratings are measured from.

I keep my cell phone in my front pocket. Could it make me sterile? If so, it could've saved me a doctor visit and a lot of pain 13 years ago.

There's now a wide variety of products designed to lessen your phone's SAR. There's Zerofon, which costs $13 and is about the size of a small pinto bean. Then there's the SAR Shield, a sticker that costs $20. Both simply stick on to your phone. There are even sprays. Maybe I need to spray my entire body to deflect all radiation coming my way! Nowhere could I find a good explanation of how these things work.

For the time being, I'm simply going to use this information as an excuse to have shorter conversations with chatty friends.

"I have to go," doesn't always do the trick, but "I think you're giving me a brain tumor" might."

But, really, so far, I no thynk has itz affekted any on me.

News Sentinel entertainment writer Wayne Bledsoe writes about gadgets for FYI. He may be reached at 865-342-6444 or bledsoew@knoxville.com.